We all stared at each other for a good ten seconds.
“All right,” he finally said. “Who the fuck are you people?”
CHAPTER
25
“Let me show you some ID,” Niamh said, closed the distance on the interloper in an instant, and zapped him with a stun baton.
He stiffened, gurgled in surprise, and fell to the forest floor, unconscious.
The rest of us stared, shocked.
Niamh noticed. “What?”
“You have rage issues,” Kahurangi said, after a second.
“If I had rage issues, he’d be dead.”
“Are you sure he’s not dead?” Aparna asked.
“I can hear him whimper when he breathes,” Niamh said.
We all stared some more.
Niamh sighed, looked to the heavens with a help me Jesus expression, and looked back at the rest of us. “What do you want me to say? This asshole could have given us away. We didn’t cross a friggin’ dimensional barrier to get popped by the first joker who saw us. I zapped him. It needed to be done. And frankly I’m pissed that you all are giving me shit about it.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s just now we have an unconscious dude to worry about.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean if we leave him here, Bella’s parasites are going to make him into cold cuts.”
Niamh shrugged. “Fuck ’em.”
“Niamh!” Aparna said.
“It’s not like he wouldn’t leave us.”
“This is what I mean by rage issues,” Kahurangi said.
“I may be working through some residual annoyance that your plan worked,” Niamh admitted to him. “Sort of worked, anyway. But I’m not wrong about this shithead.”
“Maybe you’re not,” I allowed. “But maybe we should try to be better people than the faceless henchman of an evil organization.”
Niamh sighed again. “You’re not wrong,” they said. “But look. We can’t do this every single time we meet up with one of these assholes. We’ll be here all night stuffing bodies away. Bella will go up by the time we’re done.”
“Let’s deal with this guy right now and we’ll figure out the rest of this as we go along,” I said.
“Figuring things out as we go along is our problem,” Niamh said.
“We really should have had a better plan for once we came through,” Aparna agreed.
“I’m feeling suddenly blamed,” I said.
“A little, yeah,” Kahurangi said.
I motioned. “Well. For now, let’s drag this dude out toward the tree line. Put him out there, spray him with the ‘I’m a kaiju’ pheromone. So they leave him alone.”
“Good idea,” Niamh said. “And that way when he wakes up, he’ll smell like shit.”
“I’m open to a better plan,” I said.
“I have none, so let’s do this.”
“You two do that,” Kahurangi said. “I need Aparna’s help with something.”
“What thing?” Niamh asked.
“Preparing a backup plan. So we don’t have to drag everyone’s body into the tree line.”
“Fine.” Niamh turned to me. “You want the arms or legs?”
“Your choice,” I said. Niamh took the legs. I hoisted the dude’s arms. I lift things.
“What are you doing?” Niamh asked, after we’d tossed him into the trees and sprayed him down. “Are you looting this poor bastard?”
“I’m not looting him,” I said, fishing through his pockets.
“Whatever, just remember I get half.”
I produced the dude’s phone. “There we are,” I said. I turned it on; it needed a fingerprint. I took his hand and acquired one. He murmured as I did so. I patted his cheek. He smiled sleepily and went back to wherever his brain was at the moment.
“I thought there was no cell phone signal out here,” Niamh said.
“There isn’t,” I said, and showed them the phone screen. “There is, however, a Wi-Fi connection. This weird little place brought its own intranet.”
“You going to send an email?”
“No,” I said. I looked through the apps to find one for shared files. I found it, and opened it up. “I’m looking for secret plans. And I think I just found some.”
Niamh peered over. “This will be useful until the moment you close this phone and walk away from his fingerprint.”